Food Lion offers free groceries - if you buy their brands

Salisbury-based Food Lion is offering customers $10 worth of free groceries this month if they buy Food Lion's private label products, the latest move by a grocer to promote their own brands as competition to better-known - and pricier - name brands.
The offer runs through March 29. Customers who buy Food Lion or Home 360 brand products with an MVP Card get a coupon for $1 off their next purchase for the first four products they buy and 25 cents for each product after that, up to $10.

Grocers have been pushing private label products as consumers look to save money in a down economy. The products are typically almost a third cheaper than their national brand counterparts, and consumers have been shedding old perceptions that they are somehow inferior in quality, grocery consultants say.

Private label products have risen to 20 percent of supermarket sales, according to a 2010 Deloitte study that put it bluntly: "Mounting evidence suggests that national brands are losing their hold on the consumer."

You can see the trend at your grocery store, in promotions like Food Lion's and national brands fighting for shelf space with an increasing array of products such as HT Trader, one of Harris Teeter's private labels. Family Dollar has increased its private label product sales to almost one fifth of consumable products, and recently opened an overseas office in Hong Kong to improve its private label sourcing. Walgreens even recently unveiled a private label beer, Big Flats 1901, that scores well on price (50 cents a can) and poorly on taste (skunky, and gave the reviewer in the linked article a headache).

Have you been buying more private label products? Do you think they taste the same and are as high quality?